Category: ‘Sustainable Advertising’
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Acts of Relevant Environmental Kindness
Monday, January 7th, 2008Avoiding temptation to follow 99% of all bloggers and list my New Year resolutions, I’m taking unlikely inspiration for 2008 from ‘Evan Almighty’ - part of our family holiday viewing. In case you missed it, Morgan Freeman is God and commands the building of an ARK - which turns out to be an acronym for Acts of Random Kindness. Let’s twist this into AREK - Acts of Relevant Environmental Kindness.
AREKs are small things that go big when scaled. Good examples are standby buttons, motion sensors attached to lights, planting trees and (of course) replacing fluorescent tubes with LED systems.
Let’s pick this apart:
Acts - Act is a verb, it means taking action - not talking about it. This is important and many environmental good intentions fall at the first hurdle. Cost is often the problem - products (like ours!) that have a sound financial case are much easier to act on than those that cost more money.
Relevant - not random. We need concerted, scalable action from science, government and industry to develop the right technology and then implement it. Individual AREKS are important but government AREKS scale. Legislation is probably the only way to make this happen.
Environmental - not things that feel good, look good or win votes - tangible decisions that make an environmental impact.
Kindness - yes, we’re saving the world for our children!
I’ll leave you with an AREK from Bright Green Technology, using 6 sheet displays (e.g. bus shelters) as an example of sustainable advertising.
A typical outdoor backlit display puts over 2 tonnes of carbon into the air every year (more than an average household), retrofitting a Bright Green system would reduce this to less than 1/2 tonne. This may seem like a drop in the ocean but scale this by the number of these displays in the world (nobody knows the exact number but it’s a big one) and the saving is at least 35,000 tonnes of Carbon, every single day.
Is this possible? Action is - the technology is ready and actually saves money compared with fluorescent tube lightboxes. It’s Relevant and Environmental, the decision is in the hands of government, local authorities and multi-national companies so scaling won’t be an issue and positive decisions would make a big difference. And it’s Kind to all of us - including the shareholders.
You can find this developed further on our website.
Let’s do some AREKs!
Welcome to America!
Monday, December 17th, 2007Last week was NY week, the latest in our mission to turn the Big Apple green. Bright Green thinking has definitely taken hold - everybody is specifying energy saving and sustainable products. Our client, CBS is contributing by installing our Bright Green Edge low energy poster cases in the NY subway and reducing energy consumption by almost 90%. There are new pictures on our website.
One of many meetings was a session with the management of one of the major transport hubs. They confirmed that all new equipment was evaluated for energy use as a priority.
This is welcome and valuable but the end result is a slower acceleration of energy use rather than a reduction. To really make a difference, old equipment needs to be retrofitted - massive savings are hidden here. This is something we’ll focus on more in the future.
Last time in NY, I was introduced to Andrew Revkin - he’s a leading environmental journalist on the NY Times. His blog is ‘Dot Earth‘, currently featuring ‘the funny side of global warming’ - it’s deservedly the most viewed environmental blog in the USA - recommended.
